Elon Musk - The Importance of Persistence

Jiří Samek

I'm a fan of Elon Musk even though he is a bit controversial person. When I saw a biography about his life, I was really intrigued, because previously I have read a biography about Steve Jobs and it was quite good. So I was hoping that this was going to be a similar experience and it sure was. Actually, it was even more.

Elon Musk is some of the most interesting and exciting CEOs alive. He's been trying to make the world a better place by making electric vehicles and pushing renewable energy as our only hope. He is also the head of a company called SpaceX which is an innovative competitor to NASA in the private sector. They make rockets that can be used more than once by coming back to Earth from space. It makes spaceflight much cheaper and more eco friendly.

The book is written by a columnist, Ashlee Vance, that wanted to get to know Mr. Musk. Vance starts at the beginning of Musk's life. He gets to know Musk's parents and asks them what he was like before his success. Then he moves to his current life and its complications - how he built PayPal from ground up and his struggles in personal life.

By the media, Musk is presented as a childish CEO who has issues with controlling himself, but when you read the book, you realize why is he like that. He sacrificed his teenage years for the greater good. He's a really expressive person who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty.

There are lots of technicalities and the readers that don't know Musk that much could have a problem with understanding the story. It's like a rollercoaster. The beginning of the book is slow but necessary, then you can't pull yourself out of the story and towards the end it gets a bit complicated. It starts with an explanation why Musk allowed Vance to write this biography about him. You start to look at him a bit different and then the story absorbs you until you finish the book and even after that you look him up on the internet and start to follow his up-to-date life, controversies etc.

I recommend this book to people that are interested in the current tech world and especially in Elon Musk, because you get to the bottom of things that you thought weren't important in his life. The detail depicted in this biography is phenomenal.